English National Ballet is En Pointe with iomart Mail Filter

“I simply don’t have the time to check each email to see whether it’s ok to let through to our staff so iomart’s email filtering takes the strain instead.”

• Alex Bursik, IT Support Manager for English National Ballet

ObjectiveTo stop English National Ballet being inundated with spam

Solutioniomart’s fully managed email filter

Benefits• 99.9% reduction in unwanted emails

• Filters spam in real time

• Total management via Cloud Control Panel

• 24/7 technical support

iomart customer case studyiomart provides powerful mail filtering for English National Ballet industry Art & Culture

English National Ballet is the UK’s premier touring ballet company, its raison d’être being to perform the highest quality ballet at prices everyone can afford.

It is a bold company of ambitious dancers, choreographers, costumiers, musicians and designers led by Artistic Director, the internationally renowned ballerina Tamara Rojo, and reaches for innovative collaborations, creative excellence and bold ways of honouring, but adding to, traditional ballet.

Key to achieving its aim of enriching the UK’s cultural life, English National Ballet has a number of partnerships with individuals, funders, brands and trusts and foundations.

For further details: visit www.iomart.com or email us at: info@iomart.com or call: 0800 040 7228

“We’re only a small

IT team here but we

have 250 users so

the support we get

from iomart is very

important.”

“They’re really always

there for us if we have

problems. I don’t have

to chase the techies,

they always respond

very quickly. Without

using iomart to filter

our mail we’d be in

a heck of a lot of

trouble.”

English National Ballet has its servers in-house and uses a Windows 2008 server and Exchange 2010. There are a number of departments who use its email system – the artistic team that looks after the dancers; the IT team; and the administrative team which encompasses development, marketing and payroll. The staff access their emails from a range of devices including the English National Ballet’s laptops or their own smart devices, with the artistic team in particular often accessing the IT system while abroad. The filtering system is also used to check emails which are forwarded to the ballet dancers’ personal accounts by English National Ballet.

Until English National Ballet chose to use iomart’s mail filtering software the organisation was being inundated by spam. “When we first started using iomart we were getting around 6000 emails a day but only about 5 per cent of that was mail we wanted or needed to receive,” explains Alex Bursik, IT Support Manager for English National Ballet. “Spam is incredibly irritating both for the people who get it but also for people like me who are responsible for the organisation’s IT. I simply don’t have the time to check each email to see whether it’s ok to let through to our staff so iomart’s email filtering takes the strain instead.”

Every email that is sent to an English National Ballet email address is checked first by the software and is then forwarded on if it meets the criteria. The same happens in reverse. The software uses the daily lists provided by the Internet Watch Foundation to monitor and filter appropriate and acceptable web traffic. With a large membership and a hugely important network of fundraisers it is important that external communications such as email campaigns are not sabotaged by spammers. “We have a mailing list of over 20,000 subscribers and at one stage we discovered that the contact lists we were using were being interfered with,” explains Alex.

“We needed a powerful filtering system that could stop that happening. I need to be sure we’re not on any blacklists so that our emails to our big commercial supporters are getting through to them and their emails are getting to us and we equally have to be sure that when we send out details of a new ballet it gets to our audience.” The organisation now gets over 11,000 emails a day, a large proportion of which are spam. English National Ballet has a default profile which is added to as the filtering software picks up new IP addresses to block.

“The latest version of the software allows our staff to check their own emails instead of having to come to me, which is absolutely great,” explains Alex, “as it means I don’t have to spend hours looking through filters for emails that haven’t come through. And if I do need an email hunting down then iomart will do it for me.”

Alex says he has a good relationship with the iomart team. “We’re only a small IT team here but we have 250 users so the support we get from iomart is very important,” he says. “They’re really always there for us if we have problems. I don’t have to chase the techies, they always respond very quickly. Without using iomart to filter our mail we’d be in a heck of a lot of trouble.”

Even if some spam does get through occasionally all Alex has to do is forward it to the team at iomart and they deal with it and add it to the filtering list. Alex continues, “We get calls from other companies trying to sell us filtering products all the time but we don’t entertain them because there is absolutely no reason to change. What we have works well for us by filtering out 99.9% of the bad stuff and we can handle the rest.”

To find out more about English National Ballet visit http://www.ballet.org.uk/support-us/

For further details: visit www.iomart.com or email us at: info@iomart.com or call: 0800 040 7228